The do it yourself alternative goes like this: Take 100g of chickpeas and wash them several times in water. Soak them for 2 days, changing the water at regular intervals. Take off the skins and cook them in a pressure cooker for an hour or so, giving you around 200 - 250g of skinned cooked chickpeas. You get the idea.

If you think that you won't be able to get hold of a tin of cooked chick peas within the next two days then fine. Otherwise, you might consider the following instead....

Top - Cooked, tinned chickpeas;left - skinned; and right - the removed skins.

Empty the tin of chopped tomatoes into a large pan.

Empty a tin of cooked chickpeas into a sieve and wash with tap-water. You should now have around 240g of chickpeas - this is what it says on the tin.

Now, you need to remove the skins.

Hold the chick pea between your thumb and one of your fingers and squeeze it gently away from the pointy end - the skin tends to crack at the blunt end so the split should grow and liberate the chickpea from inside, leaving you holding the skin.

32 grammes of chickpea skins.

One (or several) at a time, put the skinned chickpeas into the large pan and continue.

I don't know how many chickpeas there are in a tin of chickpeas but there are a lot and you should allocate a good 15 minutes to this activity.

You will get quicker and it doesn't take long to learn all there is to know about this process.

The tin I used produce the pile on the right which clocked in at 32 grammes, leaving around 200 grammes of skinned cooked chickpeas to eat - spread over two day's meals.

All of theingredients for wet-cooking.

In a deep pan, put the tinned chopped tomatoes, chick peas, onions (keeping around a quarter of them back for frying), chopped coriander leaf, basil leaves and salt.

Bring them to the boil and if you think the sauce is a little on the thick side, add 100mls of water.

Put the lid on, turn down the heat and keep an eye on it, giving it a stir and checking it every 5 minutes or so so that it doesn't boil dry - adding water when necessary.

In another pan, start the fryingprocess with jeera and hing.

In another pan - a milk pan will do because we are not going to be using a lot of volume for this part of the cooking - put some oil and the jeera.

Fry the jeera until it goes brown and smells nutty and then add the hing.

All of the fried ingredients. Now toadd them to the boiled ingredients.